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(1) ‘Race & Class’ Journal, had a change of editor in 1974, with Ambalavaner Sivanandan, taking over the longer existing British academic journal ‘Race’ and changing its publishing policy. Sivanandan was a Marxist, but not of the communist party type… he had his own way of using Marxism as a tool for his idea of emancipation. Though, now and at the time I was often wary of the form of their kind of marxism, as it often failed – historically – to see the shortcomings of state socialsm as practised in may countries at that time, the fundamental position on ‘class and race’ they had, I did and do agree with:

“For the black man, however, the consciousness of class is instinctive to his consciousness of colour. Even as he begins to throw away the shackles of his particular slavery, he sees that there are others besides him who are enslaved too. He sees that racism is only one dimension of oppression in a whole system of exploitation and racial discrimination, the particular tool of a whole exploitative creed. He sees also that the culture of competition, individualism and elitism that fostered his intellect and gave it a habitation and a name is an accessory to the exploitation of the masses as a whole, and not merely of the blacks. He understands with Gramsci and George Jackson that ‘all men are intellectuals’ or with Angela Davis that no one is. (If the term means anything it is only as a description of the work one does: the intellect is no more superior to the body than the soul to the intellect.) He realises with Fanon that ‘the Negro problem does not resolve into the problem of Negroes living among white men, but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white’. He acknowledges at last that inside every black man there is a working-class man waiting to get out.”
[Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. 2008. Catching history on the wing race, culture and globalisation. London: Pluto Press. ; p.17; original article published in the year 1974; ]
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The same idea expressed in poetry, republished in one of the standard works of Franz Fanon, ‘Black skin, white mask’:

“Africa I have kept your memory Africa
you are inside me
Like the splinter in the wound
like a guardian fetish in the center of the village
make me the stone in your sling
make my mouth the lips of your wound
make my knees the broken pillars of your abasement
AND YET
I want to be of your race alone
workers peasants of all lands . . .
. . . white worker in Detroit black peon in Alabama
uncountable nation in capitalist slavery
destiny ranges us shoulder to shoulder
104 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS
repudiating the ancient maledictions of blood taboos
we roll away the ruins of our solitudes
If the fl ood is a frontier
we will strip the gully of its endless
covering fl ow
If the Sierra is a frontier
we will smash the jaws of the volcanoes
upholding the Cordilleras
and the plain will be the parade ground of the dawn
where we regroup our forces sundered
by the deceits of our masters
As the contradiction among the features
creates the harmony of the face
we proclaim the oneness of the suffering
and the revolt
of all the peoples on all the face of the earth
and we mix the mortar of the age of brotherhood
out of the dust of idols.